When is it moral to lie?
We have all found ourselves in that suffocating dynamic: a question is asked, but it is not an inquiry. It is a demand for submission disguised as a question. Whether it is a family member attempting to reassert a childhood hierarchy or a bureaucratic figure seeking to “police the matrix” of social expectations and/or fiat laws, the intent is clear. They are not coming from a responsible place of seeking truth through reason; they are operating from a desire for power. In these moments, we face a moral dilemma: do we owe the raw, vulnerable truth to someone who intends to weaponize it against us? Or is there a higher form of integrity that involves using their own aggressive momentum to spiral them away from our inner sanctum?
To understand the solution, we must first diagnose the aggressor’s state. When someone demands an answer to validate their authority rather than to expand their understanding, they are not engaged in a logical dialectic; they are experiencing a cognitive hijack. Their need for control has bypassed their higher reasoning centers, placing them in a reactive, emotional state. They are seeking “certainty” as a poor substitute for truth. They need to feel right to stabilize their own fragile and externalized locus of identity. If we attempt to meet this emotional volatility with rigid logic or vulnerable honesty, we are trying to play chess with someone playing Calvinball. Because they [willfully] ignore the rules of reason—we will lose.
This is where the concept of “lying” must be re-examined through the lens of natural rights and self-ownership. There is a profound difference between aggressive deception—fraud intended to harm another—and protective privacy. Privacy is the right to keep one’s internal world secure from intrusion; secrecy is the act of hiding something out of shame or guilt. When an aggressor attempts to breach your boundaries without a warrant of mutual respect or trust, they forfeit their right to the full inventory of your thoughts. Withholding the “pearls” of your true self from those who would trample them is not a sin; it is an act of stewardship over your own consciousness.
Ignorance, rooted in the verb “to ignore,” is the willful act of disregarding information that contradicts one’s established worldview. It is the profound privation of empathy, a deliberate turning away from understanding the perspective or reality of another.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns us that “stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice” itself. Unlike “evil, which carries the seeds of its own destruction,” stupidity is entirely deaf to reason. The danger lies in the fact that the stupid person is often “self-satisfied;” they feel no need to examine their own position, and when facts contradict their prejudices, they simply brush them aside as “inconsequential.” However, if their self-satisfaction is threatened, they easily turn aggressive. Because they are driven by a need to feel “right” rather than a desire to understand, they cannot be persuaded by logic. In fact, attempting to reason with them is perilous. It is my contention that the only safe way to deal with such a volatile state is to feed the beast the validation it craves, satisfying their need for “rightness” so they do not feel compelled to destroy you in defense of their ignorance.
It is crucial to understand that for these stupid individuals, objective truth is not merely inconvenient information; it is perceived as an act of existential violence. Because their identity is fused with their subjective illusions, they experience the presentation of contradictory facts as a direct assault on their very self. In this inverted reality, their subsequent aggression—often manifesting as gaslighting or rage—feels to them like a justified act of self-defense. They initiate the conflict through provocation, yet when met with the unyielding nature of reality, they adopt the victim role, claiming you are the aggressor for disturbing their peace. By withholding the objective truth, you are declining to participate in this cycle. You are refusing to be cast as the villain in their internal melodrama, thereby de-escalating a conflict that exists entirely within their own distorted perception. This dynamic extends to the collective level as well, where society often operates on a foundation of illusory premises that are enforced with extreme deductive rigidity, simply because the simplicity and certainty provided by these shared delusions feels safer to the masses than the responsibility of, and the complex nature of, the truth.
A fiat crime is a transgression that exists not as a violation of objective, natural law—such as theft or violence—but rather as a breach of a socially or politically constructed rule designed to enforce conformity and punish dissent. It is an offense created and declared by those in power for the primary purpose of maintaining that power, making the defendant guilty by fiat, which means “by decree”, regardless of any actual harm caused.
Given this profound danger, it is not surprising that our moral right to protective privacy finds a powerful echo in the realms of natural law and constitutional law. This moral stance is structurally similar to the principles codified in the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which is not merely a legal technicality but a recognition of the natural right against self-incrimination. In any just system, the burden of proof lies with the accuser; however, in interpersonal power struggles, the aggressor often attempts to illicitly flip this burden, coercing the target into providing the very evidence needed to “convict” them of whatever fiat crime they are being accused of. When a hostile figure questions you to entrap you, they are effectively conducting an unregulated deposition. By telling them what they want to hear, you are essentially refusing to testify against yourself in a kangaroo court where the verdict—guilt—was decided before the trial began. You are upholding the principle that you are under no obligation to assist in your own persecution or to provide the fuel for a fire intended to burn you.
The solution to this interaction is to initiate a type of verbal Aikido. In physical Aikido, one does not stand rigid against a strike; one blends with the energy, guiding it harmlessly past the target by using a spiral motion. When an authoritarian figure demands an answer that fits their narrative, resisting them only feeds their desire for conflict. It gives them the resistance they need to push back harder. Instead, by offering the superficial answer they think they want to hear, we effectively remove the target. We allow their aggression to pass through empty space, spiraling them out of our personal sphere while we remain centered and untouched. It uses very little energy on our part, and while they do get what they think they want from us on a superficial level, they do so without receiving any of the true substance that would make our capitulation meaningful; they get the superficial appearance of external power, while we get to keep the actual substance of our internalized power.
This strategy requires a shift from instinct to insight. Our instinctual reaction to being treated like a child or a subordinate is often to fight back, to prove our autonomy, or to defend the truth of who we are. However, this is a trap—specifically, a punishment trap. By engaging on their level, we validate their frame of reality. We tacitly agree that their judgment matters. True mastery involves suppressing the ego’s urge to “be right” in the moment in favor of the higher goal: staying safe and retaining our energy. We are effectively out-maneuvering the narcissism of the situation by denying it the fuel of our genuine emotional reaction.
Consider the dynamic of manufacturing consent. When someone in a position of perceived power pressures you, they are attempting to coerce your agreement to their worldview. If you tell them the hard truth, they will punish you until you submit. By voluntarily offering a mirror that reflects their own “rightness” back to them, you are not consenting to their reality; you are offering them a pacifier. You are giving them the illusion of power to preserve your actual power. This is not submission; it is a tactical camouflage that allows you to navigate hostile territory without taking damage.
It is vital to realize that these interrogators are often projecting their own powerlessness. They lash out to regain a sense of control because their internal world is chaotic. When we understand this, we can detach from the victim mindset. We stop seeing ourselves as the helpless child being scolded and start seeing ourselves as the conscious observer managing a volatile situation. We become the adult in the room, even if the other person holds the nominal title. We manage the flow of information not to deceive for gain, but to prevent the “swine” from tearing us to pieces simply because they do not know the value of what they are looking at.
When man-made laws and governing systems fail to uphold justice, we are returned to the state of nature, which is a pre-political condition of perfect freedom and equality, governed by natural law in the absence of a common superior. This natural law is not a moral vacuum but is fundamentally rooted in the objective, logical order of God’s creation—the Logos—which establishes inherent duties and rights prior to any human government.
This approach safeguards our inherent right to privacy. When the social contract of mutual respect is breached by coercion, we are effectively returned to a state of nature; in this raw context, asserting the right to one’s own mind is a revolutionary act of self-preservation. We are under no moral obligation to provide ammunition to those who have set up a firing squad. By giving the “matrix police” the superficial compliance they demand, we create a buffer zone. Behind that buffer, our true thoughts, our logic, and our connection to objective reality remain untainted and unexamined by those incapable of understanding them.
Ultimately, this is a practice of preserving the sanctity of Truth itself. Truth is objective, logical, and sacred. It is not something to be tossed carelessly into the mud of an emotional power struggle. By refusing to cast our pearls before swine, we honor the truth by keeping it in a place where it is respected—within our own rational minds and shared only with those capable of reason. We are not compromising our integrity; we are protecting the signal from the noise.
In conclusion, “spiraling” an aggressor with the answer they desire is not a lie in the malicious sense; it is a defensive shield and a refusal to self-incriminate. While our default orientation must always remain rooted in Truth, wisdom dictates that we discern when that Truth will be received as a gift and when it will be perceived as a weapon. By granting the “matrix police” the hollow victory of feeling “right,” you secure the substantial victory of being free. You remain the master of your own domain, preserving your pearls for those who value them, while leaving the unaware to the dramatic chaos of their own making.
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THE UNITY PROCESS: I’ve created an integrative methodology called the Unity Process, which combines the philosophy of Natural Law, the Trivium Method, Socratic Questioning, Jungian shadow work, and Meridian Tapping—into an easy to use system that allows people to process their emotional upsets, work through trauma, correct poor thinking, discover meaning, set healthy boundaries, refine their viewpoints, and to achieve a positive focus. Read my philosophical treatise, “The Logocentric Christian”, to learn more about how Greek philosophy, the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, the law of reason, and Jesus of Nazareth all connect together.
